Electronic communications are now ubiquitous, with individuals communicating electronically on a daily basis with other individuals and with remote servers via telephone, e-mail, text messaging, the Internet and the like. Many if not most individuals now use multiple electronic devices to engage in these electronic communications. For example, an individual might routinely access a specific e-mail account from a work computer, a home computer, a cellular telephone and a tablet computer, and might also occasionally access this e-mail account from other electronic devices such as hotel computers. As another example, individuals may have incoming telephone calls sequentially routed to multiple different telephones such as a home telephone, a cellular telephone, a work telephone, etc. until the call is answered.
It may be important to ensure that electronic communications are only received by the intended recipient of the communication. Accordingly, users are routinely required to provide usernames, passwords and/or other authentication information when logging into communications services, websites and the like so that the service or system can confirm that communications are sent to the intended recipients. In some cases, the authentication information is stored in the electronic devices and automatically supplied to the communications service, website, network or the like so that the authentication step is transparent to the user. For example, cellular telephones and other electronic devices (e.g., tablet computers and certain other handheld devices) perform authentication automatically when the telephone/device establishes connectivity with the communications service (e.g., the cellular telephone network of the communications service provider) at power-on or when the device enters a covered area from a “no-service” area. In other instances, user's are required to manually provide authentication information when logging into a communications service such as, for example, Skype or Facebook (e.g., by typing in a password).